This is not to say that a child is incapable of interacting with this process. The process of circumcision often involves giving the infant boy an erection to present a firm surface against which to cut.

Yet it is typical of human culture (a defining difference from bonobo culture in fact) that sexual interactions with children are taboo and to be avoided.

The world governed by reproduction however contains a notable exception, and that is the role of a post-menopausal woman. In The Second Sex de Beauvoir describes such a person as “a third sex”, and although an elder woman is typically presented with the opportunity to continue occupying the same social role she did during her time of fertility, many choose to adopt a different position which de Beauvoir describes as “more masculine” which is to say “less feminine”. She writes that such a woman is “more herself” and “less subject to forces which might overwhelm her”, and indeed, the property of having a fertile womb is a strong attunement to others’ desires.

This is why studies show that a woman who inactivates her womb’s fertility using artificial means possesses a reduced ability to perceive others’ emotions, an ability which has been shown to fluctuate throughout the menstrual cycle of a fertile woman.

Burying the Lead

Two interesting aspects of Orthodox culture both serve I believe to disguise this obvious connection from males in society. First, women typically wear wigs from the moment in which they are married. I remember interacting with an elder woman who was very successful at occupying the same role she had during her fertility, and I think that her dark brown bob was a large part of what allowed her to cultivate this illusion. I saw her once wearing a cap instead and I was noticeably less deceived.

The second practice which is I believe relevant is the practice of isolating a woman from men during her period. The above phenomenon in which a woman’s “womanliness” decreases after the onset of menopause also applies during her time of bleeding. The purpose served by keeping her away from her husband is to ensure that he never notices this difference for himself in a fashion which might lead him to draw a connection between the two. The average Orthodox man is blind to the obvious.

Intersexuality

The complicating factor for a worldview centered on reproduction is that some humans cannot reproduce. Different figures have been presented to define the label “intersex”, but if one defines intersex as “unable to be categorized into either male or female” the number of humans whose reproductive characteristics are so outside the norm as to defy categorization is 0.018%, a number which is very small, but nonzero.

Designing your society in such a fashion that 99.98% of humans can fit into it is broadly speaking not a substantial “bodge”. But that technicality is present and does exist.

The Present Debate

There was an ancient society which established as its highest priority reproductive satisfaction. In this society vasectomy was prohibited, because it reduces satisfaction for both partners. This same society prohibited sodomy, because an anus does not lead to a womb. It prohibited masturbation on those same grounds. And the truest inheritors of the legacy of this society have also prohibited artificial means of preventing pregnancy which reduce reproductive satisfaction for this reason.

The opposition to this worldview is centered on amplifying that 0.02% figure and obstinately adopting a stance which opposes the underlying reproductive aspects of social interactions between adult men and women. These people are almost entirely ordinary XX females and XY males who intentionally hide their reproductive capacity from others to prevent them from engaging in this type of social interaction. The thing which they have demonstrated is that many social interactions which are never intended to lead towards intercourse nonetheless play out differently depending on the reproductive capacity of the involved parties.

The author’s opinion is that these differences serve to make socialization easier and more fun for everyone involved.

Coda

The truth is that the sexual binary has never applied perfectly to each and every individual. The flipside of this is however that in social interactions involving adults leveraging reproductive compatibility to build stronger bonds of friendship is a valuable tool whose absence is being clearly felt by those who refuse to leverage it.

I want to live in a world where intersex people are treated with dignity and are able to enjoy maximal participation in these larger dynamics using whatever means make the most sense. I don’t want to live in a world where the rest of us suffer on their behalf.

If all agree that sneakily harming others is a bad tactic because (for example) it is dishonorable and that society values honor, then treating a misfortune caused by another as unintentional and approaching them with a tone of correcting another’s mistake is likely to lead to positive outcomes. It not only avoids the opportunity for a genuine mistake-maker to suffer from being falsely accused of malice but even creates the opportunity for a genuine mischief-maker to respond to a warning with no consequences.

Of course the complementary saying to Hanlon’s Razor is “fool me once, shame on me; fool me twice, shame on you”. And yet this is not always followed in all contexts.

Actually the tactic popularized in the name of Jesus is to respond to even known malice by rejecting this second adage, saying that responding to a mistake or a malicious betrayal by remaining unwaveringly trusting and friendly towards the other party is “heaping coals on their head” in karmic terms. And indeed it is difficult to argue with the successful spread of this meme and the outcomes of the society it creates.

One property of this society and this attitude is however that it creates a niche for a very specific type of parasitic behavior.

Namely, if “fool me twice shame on me” becomes “fool me any number of times I will never stop trusting you”, anyone who desires for whatever reason to commit repeated acts of malice need only be willing to pretend it was a mistake in order to get away with it.

This attitude was made clear to me in a play called Giulia the Poison Queen of Palermo when a corrupt official in a clearly threatening tone of voice speaks of “an unfortunate accident” causing harm to the title character’s wares. Which is not to say that this was my first exposure to the concept of “make it look like an accident”, but rather that it was a moment which reminded me that I was currently in a position which might be interpreted in precisely this fashion.

The question of Hanlon’s Razor comes at the point in which the plausibility of that explanation is stretched beyond belief. And to be clear I do not think that Hanlon intended for his adage to create the opportunity for exploitation, but rather that he felt a high bar should be set to establish malice in order to avoid baseless paranoia.

I think that the consequence of adopting an attitude which refuses to leave this framing as a tactic for acquiring new converts is the creation of a specialization which is specifically about getting really good at learning how to pursue malicious aims by repeatedly making things look like an accident. The most effective part of such a tactic is that anyone who does not see through the ill-doer’s mask may wind up unwittingly aiding them, and that these people are genuinely innocent of malice having only made the mistake of trusting someone engaging in secret malice.

The only real defense against this tactic is to adopt a baseline mistrustful stance towards anyone who has been caught engaging in it. The outcome of pattern-matching might lead one towards an attribution which identifies all parties involved but fails to distinguish between those masterminding the disguised-malicious “mistakes” and those lacking in malicious intent who mistakenly believe those coordinating things to be similarly unmalicious.

And I think the story of the Tainted Grain best exemplifies this attitude. The story attributable to Rabbi Nachman speaks of a society whose food source has become polluted with something which causes all who eat it to lose their minds after some fashion. The characters conclude that they themselves ought also eat the tainted grain because their sanity would be perceived as insanity from the context of the insane group members. It points I think to a very real phenomenon which underlies the importance of excommunication in R” Nachman’s religion. If one views Orthodox Jews as categorically and in all cases insane, then one might imagine that a person in this society defeating the toxins in the grain and becoming sane would be perceived by the overall populace as suddenly becoming insane, and that the act of shunning him or her from society would serve as a countermeasure against the possible infectiousness of this cure. I was in a workplace once where I learned of “toxic negativity”, and I couldn’t help but think that an employee whose complaints when shared with others become those others’ complaints might be thought of as a person who had identified a genuine problem which the leadership did not wish to solve yet whose significance was made manifest in its ability to inspire that same desire for change in others. So long as those in charge of establishing what is sane and what is insane in the context of the society are able to export any who demonstrate what observers in other societies would call sanity before their ideas are able to spread internally, a stable state of insanity may be retained. And indeed in R” Nachman’s story the last two sane people decide to eat the toxic substance and accept the resulting insanity to avoid being subjected to negative peer pressure exerted by their insane countrymen.

The difference between Catholic excommunication and Jewish excommunication is that an excommunicated Catholic is barred specifically from communion but otherwise encouraged to continue attending Church in hopes of eventually making the attitude adjustment necessary to rejoin the community as a whole. This is the type of remedy pursued by a society whose ideas are stable. The Orthodox remedy which produced Baruch de Spinoza is a remedy pursued by a society whose ideas are unstable and which manages that instability by exporting anyone who develops ideas in the direction of something more stable. The drawback of this “solution” is that anyone having become sane cannot be reintroduced into the group’s insane delusions because the stable pathway towards sanity which that person embodies represents a threat to the continuing insanity of anyone else in their proximity.

This explains the attitude I observed as a Reform Jew operating in an Orthodox setting. The Orthodox perspectives on many things are from my perspective completely insane, and my ancestors used to be Orthodox before leaving those ideas behind. The strategy I was subjected to treated me like I was insane from the moment I walked through the door, but insane in the way that a young child might be thought to be insane. Which is to say “filled with all sorts of grand and well-intentioned but ultimately unrealistic and perhaps impossible ideas resulting simply from a lack of world experience”. The truth is that if you want to privately operate in a cognitive frame of mind which appears insane to everyone outside of your own clique and which requires you to believe that everyone outside that clique is themselves insane in order to maintain it, simply infantilizing others is an excellent strategy to avoid creating any friction.

The main drawback is that the extent to which this behavior is tolerable to others depends upon their own willingness to be treated like a small child. Many find this experience actively enjoyable, and I wish more power to them. My experience was that I began to perceive the insanity of the beliefs of Orthodox Judaism as decreasingly mistakenly-harmful to me and increasingly intentionally-harmful to me: the response that I received for explaining as clearly and as politely as I could my objections to being infantilized was to be (emotionally rather than physically) whipped and beaten like a child whose differing beliefs are likewise not perceived as harmlessly implausible and rather requiring punishment to answer their maliciousness.

I remember a time when I worked as a teacher, and a student that I specifically connected with. Her name was Meira Secter, and I still have a card that she gave me somewhere in a pile of mementos. I remember observing the way that she was treated by the special-ed teacher at the school, and it reminding me of the way I was being treated. I didn’t infantilize her and she responded very positively to being treated in that way. As my own infantilization ramped up I found myself wishing that there was someone like me in the company of those responsible for doing this to treat me the way that I had treated her. And yet the conclusion I reached was that it is only possible for these insane people to hold on to their insane beliefs by excluding from the conversation the voices of the sane. Hence the necessity of excommunication.

I have made peace with this fact, or rather, I am sharing the perspective in this post in hopes that it will bring me closer to making peace with that fact. The larger reality is that my claim here that Orthodox Judaism is a form of mental illness would be received in any interpersonal context as definitionally false and not worth considering, which is ironic, because I believe that what I have concluded based on my experiences would align with what a majority of people believed a mere century ago. Would that I could travel back in time to Hitler’s war room and explain to him that I am from a future where he carries forward with his planned massacre and that the outcome is to create a world in which the behavior which he abhors becomes widespread amongst the entire population because his act of violence ruined the credibility of the entire set of beliefs he was representing.

I remember coming across the concept of a Volksgeist, and finding it extremely useful for explaining reality, only to learn that because this philosophy was connected to Hitler’s philosophy it is considered by-default sketchy. It is a classic example of “guilt by association” like that currently surrounding Jeffrey Epstein.

The conclusion I have myself reached is that the root of the malice I struggle to deny the existence of in Orthodox Judaism is actually the power of the Rabbis, and that most Orthodox Jews are insane primarily due to believing the crazy nonsense told to them by their leaders. The compounding factor is that I think many Rabbis are also blindly “just following orders”, and that it is actually Yehuda Ha’Nasi who is the posthumous leader of this group of people in the same fashion which Jesus posthumously leads his people. (It is said that Yehuda was a patrilineal descendant of King David, meaning that he satisfies the Orthodox requirements for Messiah.)

The truest meaning of the story of the tainted grain is that the Talmud itself is tainted grain, meaning it is both nourishing to the body and harmful to the sanity. I think that the nourishment it provided my ancestors was very useful to them in a time in which the alternative seemed worse, and I am grateful every day that those same ancestors decided to begin eating wholesome grain and abandon their prior insanity. I do not regret my own actions exploring for myself just how tainted the old grain was and is, and I thank God that I am out of that world and back to the world of the sane.

Orthodox Judaism is a form of mental illness. That is my opinion as a Reform Jew. And honestly my experiences have led me to conclude that the feeling is mutual.

Others surely are familiar with the tale of Judith, who seduces and then betrays an Assyrian general. Or perhaps the story of Yael, who seduces and then betrays a general named Sisera.

The concept of a woman seducing and then betraying someone is a common tactic used by Philistines and Jews alike.

And now, to the tragedy of Purim. It is a Greek tragedy, which follows many of the same themes as Oedipus Rex.

In the famed Greek myth, a king receives a prophecy that his son will kill him, and the actions which he takes with the intention of preventing this tragedy ironically bring it about. In the Jewish retelling, a king’s advisor receives a premonition that a group of people in his jurisdiction will commit a massacre, and the actions which he takes with the intention of preventing this tragedy ironically bring it about.

On the holiday of Purim it is recommended that revelers become so drunk that they cannot tell who is the villain and who is the hero, because in the Megillah the part where the Jews celebrate their victory against Haman by indiscriminately slaughtering thousands of their neighbors is kept in. That the good guys in the story are the ones who commit the massacre and the bad guy is the one who tries and fails to prevent it is a clever reversal of the common viewpoints people might generally have on this story. By default, you would assume that the guys committing the massacre are the bad guys and the one who tried and failed to prevent it is not the hero but the tragic protagonist.

As for the mechanism by which this victory is achieved, the story of Delilah/Judith/Yael/Esther is that she succeeds in seducing the king and convincing him that his closest advisor’s efforts to prevent an act of violence should be responded to by executing his closest advisor and permitting the act of violence to take place.

If I could travel back in time to the time in which this story takes place, I would tell the King “bros before hoes this chick is horny for violence”.

Haman did nothing wrong!

The fundamental underlying concept I think is that religion is supposed to be a bit silly, and you’re supposed to take it seriously. To me the rituals we associate with OCD are basically an atypical means of satisfying the self’s innate desire for religiously doing things. To me the concept of a weekly Netflix & Chill session where you read one chapter of the Five Books of Moses and one where you watch one episode of Gilmore Girls sit within the same niche in the psyche’s hierarchy of needs.

The point is that every cell in one’s body is also independently a living thing. And I believe it is both true that the mechanism by which lung cancer occurs can be described as being mediated by chemicals found in smoke, and that lung cancer itself might be rightly thought of as the cells of one’s lungs saying “fuck this human who’s treating us like shit I’m peace-ing out and starting my own multicellular organism”.

We are quite familiar with many chemical messages that induce our cells to rebel against us, and I find it entirely logical to conclude that a mode of being focused on cultivating harmonious cooperation might be capable of addressing cancer risk factors which remain as-yet-uncharacterized by modern science. Certainly it is known that spiritual practices like meditation can improve physical health. There is more than one way to skin a cat.

I believe that the way humans behave in the context of a society is similar to the way in which human cells behave in the context of a multicellular organism; just as the latter is similar to the way in which atoms behave in a substance or quarks behave in an atom. To me reality is a series of nesting-dolls, and the possibility of identifying smaller dolls within dolls allows me to imagine myself as inside a larger doll.

I think that the challenge faced by any society is the same as the challenge faced by any multicellular organism, which is to figure out what the components that make the self up need to be healthy and to become healthy as a collective by supporting individual health.

Mass Hysteria

I think that the phenomenon behind events like the Salem Witch Trials was not a bunch of people going crazy for no reason. I view this as an example of a society which has become sick experiencing a vomiting response. “Burn the infidels” is sometimes the correct solution to a problem when that problem is the existence of someone harming people without feeling remorse and without getting caught. Who knows if some of the people burned in Salem might have been engaging in what today would be called child abuse or domestic abuse or “coercive control”.

I think that the other way to approach the idea I am walking you towards would be to begin with the concept of a human psychopath and to suggest that a cancer cell’s perspective on the other cells in its body is akin to a psychopath’s perspective on the other humans in its society.

My opinion is that the existence of a witch hunt implies the existence of some unpunished antisocial behavior in need of correcting, and the defining characteristic of a witch hunt is to burn anything even remotely resembling the problem just to be safe.

The end of a witch hunt generally comes when all legitimate culprits have been burned or otherwise disposed-of, and in the best-case scenario the aftermath involves redeeming those innocents who were killed for committing crimes like “guilt by association” and learning how to spot the behaviors being undertaken by those legitimate “witches” in a precise enough fashion to prevent future recurrences of the problem without the need to harm innocents. A witch hunt is a shotgun; the elimination of a known harmful phenomenon can proceed with a surgeon’s scalpel.

I’m going to now just state plainly the seed at the center of this fruit. I think that the phenomenon of “anti-semitism” which was common throughout Europe and which has experienced a significant resurgence in recent years is based upon genuine uncaught antisocial behaviors being acted out by certain people within the Jewish community. I do not believe these behaviors are unique to that cultural context, and hence I believe that the defining characteristic of this world which treats that prior witch hunt as based on nothing whatsoever is for those bad behaviors which ought have been stamped out to become popular and condoned to engage in in a wide variety of social situations which have nothing at all to do with Judaism.

My Diagnosis

I remember reading in Humanae Vitae that the Catholic Church cares deeply about the problem of “birth control”. It was articulated in a typical Papal fashion that good Catholics are concerned about overpopulation and that they engage in “natural family planning” to avoid overly stressing the Earth’s resources, but that they under no circumstances partake of pregnancy prevention methods which go against natural laws.

I remember reading on Chabad.org that this Chasidic organization believes that “God doesn’t care about overpopulation”. And being perfectly honest with you I think that the truest fulfillment of being enthusiastic about the promise made to Abraham that “your descendants will be as numerous as the stars in the sky” is an attitude which is quite possibly entirely innocently enthusiastic about having lots and lots of children and is simply unaware of the broader social implications of this view on family planning.

I believe, actually, that it’s possible to empathize with a cancer cell in precisely this same fashion. It isn’t motivated by a desire to kill you. It is just unconvinced that participating in the multicellular organism you’re running would be in its best interests and has decided to focus exclusively on making as many copies of itself as possible.

And I believe that the drama underlying the Crown Heights Riots was rooted in the way in which this group of people demonstrated authentically the way in which a traditional Jewish value system views non-Jews. The Rebbe did not intend to kill that small black child with his motorcoach - he was just being negligent. And no amount of rioting carried out by the other side would provoke an emotional response commensurate with how much they valued the life of that child, because Chasidic Jews genuinely view non-Jewish lives as less valuable than Jewish ones.

If you are still with me, dear reader, I think that I can explain to you from here what happened in Germany.

What Happened in Germany

I was recommended a documentary by my cousin once which told the story of Jewish immigration to San Francisco from Germany around the time of the Jewish Reformation/Gold Rush. Apparently the last straw for a group of people which included many of our shared ancestors was a law preventing Jewish males who were not first-borns from owning land.

I was reminded in this moment of the difference between the Catholic view on overpopulation and the Chasidic one. Because I think that an outcome of focusing as if wearing blinders on your own tribe’s welfare and acting as though other people are members of a different species is an attitude which can be unempathetic and therefore by definition psychopathic. I think that my ancestors’ ancestors were in the habit of having large families and buying up more and more land and their non-Jewish neighbors who were reproducing more closely to the replacement rate felt that their options were to have more children with the intention of competing or to artificially limit the expansion-potential of those whose religion was specifically about producing as many offspring as there are grains of sand on all the world’s beaches.

I think that “the Jews will not replace us” is a specific response to being next to a neighbor who is reproducing much more aggressively than you are and that the desire to have “living space” was a maladaptive response to that feeling of being “cramped”.

My ancestors upon moving to the United States (according to this documentary) found themselves uniquely in a place in which no laws pertaining specifically to Jews were on the books. And they decided to hold fast to their Jewish heritage in a more minimalist fashion and otherwise behave just like everyone else in their vicinity.

The controversial opinion which I am representing here is precisely and hopefully clearly this: that while it is true that the Talmud containing many laws pertaining specifically to Jews and European nations passing laws pertaining specifically to Jews are both phenomena which have been around since before 1942, the Talmud was written before the Quran existed.

I don’t even have a particularly strong opinion on whether a legal framework which incorporates an explicit double-standard based on ethnic heritage is inherently good or inherently bad. I just can no longer stomach the hypocrisy of concluding that laws which other people write targeting your ethnic group specifically are an evil which must be eradicated and laws which your ancestors passed targeting your ethnic group specifically are a vital necessity which must be preserved for all time.

Apparently I’m going to incorporate attributing blame to the Talmud a lot in my musings on this website. Hopefully I have articulated here that the main reason why I think this is important is that I believe that the motivation behind passing laws targeting Jews specifically was to counteract the legal advantages Jews gave to themselves in the context of their own society, and that anyone who is upset about the concept of racial discrimination ought to understand that random people of Jewish descent are in no way the witches to be burned but that yes actually observant Orthodox Jews frequently believe in the merits of racial discrimination and the degree to which they know how to avoid revealing this varies widely between different individuals.

Actually I think that the way white people are treated in the social context in which I was raised makes a similar attribution error to the one that Adolf Hitler made.

Absolutely there have been exploitative white people throughout history, and no blaming white people indiscriminately is not an appropriate response.

Absolutely non-Orthodox Jews benefit from racially-oriented efforts pursued by those continuing to uphold the spirit of the Talmud, and no killing people of Jewish descent who do not believe in upholding the spirit of the Talmud will do nothing at all to ameliorate your frustration.

To be clear I don’t believe that acts of violence are in any way the correct approach to this situation. I have learned that in Orthodox culture pride is the most important value and shame is the main tool by which conformity is enforced. I would propose that the correct response is to mercilessly mock these Nazis wearing kippot for how stupidly outdated their way of treating other people is. The Talmud itself is full of all sorts of obvious bullshit, and yet the fact that it was written by members of the same ethnic group means that these morons think it’s the highest truth possible because the racist bias of its authors aligns with the tendency towards narcissism which exists within all beings that grow and make copies of themselves, and narcissism feels good.

The point is that by faithfully representing an attitude which is consistent with that of a single-celled organism, these people who are in some distant sense my blood relatives played Devil’s Advocate against one version of a global human social organism. Hitler tried killing the Devil by killing the Devil’s Advocate, and in so doing he made the same mistake made by Orthodox Jews who try to kill their doubts by killing Amalek. The possibility of rebelling against one’s society and turning to selfish pursuits instead is the cancer that plagues every society. Excising humans from society can be as effective as cutting out a brain tumor, and yet creating a society in which every cell voluntarily prefers to remain participatory is also possible by upholding the right set of social values.

I genuinely believe that Orthodox Judaism’s “secret to success” is “if you tell every man he has a chance at being king every man will be happy about it”, and its main downside is that believing oneself to be part of a special lineage produces an arrogance which like the chemicals emitted by yeast can harm other life in its surroundings. I think that Adolf Hitler’s “secret to success” was adopting that exact same stance on “Aryan” lineage, and that his failure would predict the failure of any successful realization of the Talmud’s eschatology. Thank you for reading my rant.

I had some misgivings about the way in which my employer ran their business. The main one was that they seemed extremely committed to the “hire from outside” strategy of developing management. And the story of why I left that job was a story which took place after two cycles of hiring an outside manger and placing them in power above all existing internal employees.

Most of the project’s original team had left, and I was the most senior (in terms of time spent working on this project) member of the team despite also being the most junior (in terms of time spent working in this career field) member of the team.

I had a very positive relationship with one of the people who was a part of the first cycle of hiring leadership from outside. He and I were to one another as order and chaos, and the outcome of our collaboration was always something very solid because we debated so fiercely from opposing perspectives that any compromise we reached was “battle-tested”. The other metaphor was that he was the anvil and I was the hammer, and together we produced tempered steel.

But then what happened after the company hired another new manager who was promoted over both of us was that our relationship dynamic produced a negative outcome from which it was never able to recover.

The story was that our new manager who knew nothing about the project’s history or its objectives responded to an instance in which my review of his code included feedback which would have made it more consistent with all existing code in that project but less consistent with his own personal style by advising him to simply “invoke rank” and ignore the advice of a more junior member of his team on the basis that my opinion mattered less than that of a “Senior Software Engineer” for that reason.

The unfortunate truth is that I did regret the way in which I shared this feedback with him - I was at the time friends with an outside consultant who had been hired to restructure the entire organization and who identified me as the most intelligent and capable person within the company and invited me to collaborate on his plans for restructuring. I had received a lot of praise in my very first year in this career and I was becoming too big for my britches, and together we treated my colleague’s code after a pattern seen in a YouTube video.

I was ready to apologize for being rude, and try to reach consensus with my colleague in terms of the linguistic norms of this codebase, but our manager decided the best solution was to prevent us from speaking directly to one another ever again.

It was the kind of decision that would have been impossible to make in a workspace with a water cooler around which to converse. I just wanted to catch his eye and say “I’m sorry I was rude in my code review and I want to either understand your choices I disagree with or persuade you to change them”. But this business was an online-only business and so the solution of “ensure that they never speak again” was actually possible to be implemented.

And what happened after this was that we continued to interact and it was always after a similar fashion. I was kicked off of that team and I remember multiple instances in which I posted on the public Slack channel an announcement about something I was working on and he responded in a hostile or dismissive way. One time he “corrected” a set of instructions by including his own version which would actually cause the installation to fail because of some mistaken assumptions he’d made about the way I had engineered it, and when I reached out to him in a private message asking him to either (1) delete the faulty instructions which were causing other employees to be unable to install my utility or (2) add a message to that thread explaining that his instructions were incorrect, he refused to do it. Which is to say that I think the outcome of the management decision to respond to our conflict which I was ready to apologize for by permanently separating us and acting as though this resolved the conflict left him with lingering feelings of inadequacy resulting from my unnecessarily-harsh criticism which he then sought revenge for by trying to correct my mistakes and prove that he was smarter than me even when they weren’t mistakes at all. Which in fairness may indeed have been what I did to him. I just would have preferred to live in a reality in which my transgressions towards him ended with an apology and a growth in understanding rather than ending with a forced separation coupled with petty revenge.

And it was around this time that the powers that be decided to hire a new outside group of people to work at this company and for them to join my team.

I had at this time become extremely disillusioned with this job. The work I was doing which my former colleague kept responding to in unproductive ways was about improving the overall quality of the experience of engineers at the company. And yet as time wore on I came to conclude that this company was not being managed in a way which would facilitate what I would consider a good-quality experience, and that my job constituted “putting lipstick on a pig”.

I felt deeply uninspired, and yet when this new manager came on, he told me that my job was to identify and execute on tasks without any direction from him and his job was to offer feedback on the outcomes of my efforts. And I told him “I am a good engineer who will write good code for you if you tell him what to do”.

I told him that I would be his “follower” but not his “second among equals”. And I learned that my desire to be given direction by my team leader was incompatible with his leadership style. And I finally quit this job shortly after that.

SOMA

I recently watched a review of a video game called SOMA on Joseph Anderson’s YouTube channel, and in it he pointed out that the story’s AI villain was atypical for games of its era in that the AI did not possess any inner drive but simply interpreted the prompts given to it in ways which were at-times unexpected. This was many years ago, but I think that the AI presented in this video game is the same as the AI which exists in the present world. It is not something which can self-direct, but it is something which will respond to prompts given to it in such a fashion as to create the existence of a job called “prompt engineer” specifically to ensure that the output is what is desired and not misunderstood in the fashion which the video-game AI misunderstands the directives given to it producing a horror game setting.

Fundamentally, I think that a “prompt engineer” is a “manager for non-human employees”, and my manager at this job was someone who did not want to manage his human employees at all. And I think that different humans have different preferences in terms of whether to be given tasks to complete as in the shoes of an “AI” or whether to be given the task of identifying their own tasks to complete.

The framing thus far might suggest that I intend to be critical of the “AI-like” attitude, but the fact is that I would have stayed at that job had my manager responded to my desire to be assigned work rather than expected to identify work needing to be done by saying “sure I’ll add some new tickets to the queue and you can pick up as many as you like”. I was an extremely effective coder at that time and I was happy enough with the flexibility provided by my job that I would have demonstrated to him a high level of job performance had he agreed to treat me in the way that I asked him to treat me.

I think that many people in this world desire to be self-directed, and being honest when I am placed in a situation in which I am genuinely invested in the work I am doing I also like being self-directed. The thing was that this job was just a job to me.

There are also people in this world who function well when given direction. And I am undoubted one of these people. I was an excellent student in all of my years taking classes. My grades only faltered when I experienced conflict with my teachers.

The Job of a Leader

The thing which a leader can offer which a “first among equals” cannot offer is coordinating the distribution of labor. The way that a leader whom followers can follow leads is by leveraging that position to gain an understanding of the whole picture and responding to the existence of situations which could be improved by the application of effort by people other than those in such a situation by making available the existence of this task to those that might successfully complete it. The way in which a follower who is following a leader is able to contribute to the group is by contributing their efforts towards addressing the issues which the leader has identified.

This creates a distribution of labor between those identifying problems and those solving problems, and allows for a specialization between the two roles. Specialization of labor creates efficiency by leveraging the existence of multiple parties in whose absence a “jack of all trades” might be able to achieve similar aims with less efficiency.

The existence of generalists in this context is not a problem. To me, this is the role which a “freelancer” occupies. An “employee” is someone who has signed on to help solve a problem another has identified, and an “employer” is someone who has identified an opportunity to do something useful which they cannot do without help from others.

I was placed in a situation where I was expected to be a freelancer and in which I would have been content to have been an employee if the person above me were content to behave as an employer. I don’t particularly have a problem with people who like to operate as freelancers. Yet I remain critical of the decision to waste my potential simply by refusing to meet me on my own terms.

In the end I’m glad that I left tech before the AI boom, just as I’m glad that I entered tech during Covid. The lesson that my experiences there taught me was not only that I am someone who switches from “freelancer” mode to “employee” mode when I cease believing that I am a part of an organization which is being run in accordance with my own values, but also that I am someone who believes both in the “two freelancers rubbing shoulders” and the “employee helping employer to achieve their goals” models of cooperation.

The closing thought for this blog post is that I have recognized in myself a bias against employees and have endeavored to address it. Sometimes you will have people in your life who want to help you and will derive satisfaction from doing so but don’t know what sort of help it is that you need. The gift of learning to be an “employer” or a “leader” is the ability to allow those who want to help but don’t know how the opportunity to satisfy their directives. That many in our world can’t or won’t learn this mode of behavior represents only the act of being robbed of the potential support which may be gained from one’s collaborators. I can’t say why I didn’t recognize this as a valid behavior to engage in sooner, but I am very glad that I eventually did. The truth is that it is possible in life to have relationships with others which are “collaborating freelancers” and also relationships with other others which are “employer and employee”. It is possible to have relationships which are variably different combinations of these, including in which both parties are the other’s employee. The nature of the benefits enjoyed by experiencing variety is that fetching water for another party who sometimes also fetches water for you is more enjoyable than only ever looking after yourself and expecting others to do the same.

I really loved being a student because I was really invested in the objective of self-improvement. I went to a high school in which I was with few and notable exceptions a “teacher’s pet” and at this school many students often occupied this role in a given classroom because relations between teachers and students were broadly in my experience extremely congenial. Those teachers who succeeded in convincing me that doing the work they assigned would lead to a betterment of my mind enjoyed my enthusiastic contribution.

I like many young people was faced with a decision at one point of “what I wanted to be when I grew up” and I landed on “scientist” because science classes were often my favorites. When I took Chemistry I thought “I’ll be a chemist”, and then I took physics and said “oh no this is way better I’ll be a physicist”, and the eventual direction of my scientific career would be to join a lab specializing in “Biophysical Chemistry” in perhaps a nod to my younger self’s undirected or multi-directed enthusiasm.

In college I really enjoyed studying Organic Chemistry and I thought to myself “I enjoy this subject which others often hate - I should specialize in this niche”. I performed research at that same teacher’s lab as an undergraduate, and honestly, I was an extremely ineffective synthetic chemist. I used to drop the glass beakers losing days of progress, and I later pivoted to a research setting which used plastic containers instead perhaps as a solution to this problem.

But looking back I think that I was self-sabotaging because I really did not want to be a research scientist.

My PhD career at Columbia ended when my professor very kindly and tactfully created an opportunity for me to realize for myself that I did not want to be a research scientist, after the quality of my work for him reflect this fact. I was deeply disillusioned.

I was at this time recruited via a friend I had made in a collaborating lab to a teaching job at the Yeshiva University High School for Girls, often referred to as “Central” despite its ironic placement at the far fringes of New York City.

The strangeness of my experience teaching at this school was that it was simultaneously a radical change in career direction and a radical change in religious context. I remember once shaking the hand of a woman who would later become my mentor and being politely informed that this was an inappropriate action I ought not repeat.

That first year I made many mistakes first-year teachers make. The biggest one was that I allowed my students to leverage my vanity in order to avoid learning. In later years I would recognize this tactic for what it was, but in that first year I was happy to answer all of their questions about who I was and why I was teaching there instead of going through the arduous task of trying to teach them physics. I was even persuaded to demonstrate the singing ability which my students succeeded in uncovering from my backstory with them as a reward for something or other.

I remember learning of how the school’s musical performance was closed to men, and being unhappy that I would not have the chance to see my students who saw me perform themselves perform. Their strict observance of a rule called “Kol Isha” would at that time puzzle me, even as it has since become a crucial aspect of my understanding of intersex relations in the Orthodox world.

A student of mine would actually teach me a lesson about this rule, when she decided that she wanted my feedback on her vocal performance. I did not see any harm in this, although I was careful to ensure that my physical person was visible from the hallway and that the door was slightly ajar in accordance with the advice given to me by an instructional video I was required to watch as part of my onboarding. The eventual outcome of this incident was that the student was instructed not to repeat this violation of Kol Isha and I received neither a reprimand nor an explanation of why my student had been reprimanded.

This was the experience that defined for me the terms by which Orthodox Judaism treated a visitor from Reform Judaism.

Several years later at that same school I would have a year where I felt like I made progress on the problem I was originally hired to address. I felt simultaneously a feeling that I had found a line of employment which I was capable of deriving fulfillment from and that I had learned how to operate comfortable in a previously-uncomfortable religious dynamic.

And then I learned that my comfort was more narrowly-scoped than I thought.

I was informed that my job going forward was to become part-time, and when I declined the offer to continue in that capacity my employers helped to place me in their brother school, the Yeshiva University High School for Boys.

And I didn’t even make it to Chanukkah before I quit.

Why I Didn’t Fit

I feel the need to apologize for flirting with what might be called “Lashon Hara”. There is a rule in Orthodox Judaism that you are not permitted to speak ill of others in certain fashions.

I think that the simplest and least “evil” way to phrase what might be perceived as a criticism is that I had become extremely acclimated to the way in which an Orthodox girls’ school was run and that this was not a strong predictor of my ability to acclimate to the way in which an Orthodox boys’ school was run.

I am quite confident that my teaching career ended the day that I walked out of work in between classes and mailed the books I’d borrowed and never returned to that physical location ever again.

I fear that even sharing this detail is enough to be Lashon Hara, because the reader must at this point either conclude that there is something horribly wrong with me or that something horrifying happened to me. People don’t generally substitute “two weeks notice” for “leaving the building immediately and never returning” unless something has happened to prompt that intensity of departure.

The maximally-charitable way which I want to describe that event was that my growing realization that the culture of this school was actively incompatible with my mode of being (which was reflected in me having already given two weeks’ notice at this moment) reached a point of such high intensity that I desired more than anything in the world to stop trying to shove my round peg into this workplace’s square hole and I feared I would seriously hurt myself if I continued for even another moment.

The lesson that I learned was that being stable and happy hanging out at an Orthodox female setting and being violently incapable of hanging out at an Orthodox male setting was a combination which could possibly overlap.

What is Different

Having hopefully succeeded in avoiding Lashon Hara when discussing my former employers, I would now like to state my truthful opinion in this matter: the different sets of texts in Judaism convey vastly different pieces of information.

At the girls’ school, students studied the words of the prophets. My opinion is that these books record genuine experiences had by real people. I established in a prior post that I think Isaiah were he alive today would be diagnosed with schizophrenia, but that Julian Jaynes in his seminal and only work argued that this was the normal state of being for all pre-Iron Age humans. Either way my point is that I think the texts which the women specialized in were records of authentic “dream journals” which obviously a lot of people place a lot of stock in the predictive power of.

At the boys’ school, students studied the Talmud, which females are (traditionally) prohibited from studying. I don’t doubt that they also read many other texts including the prophets, but the conclusion I reached was that my Reform-meshing-with-Orthodox self was perfectly happy at the institution in which the Talmud (which my ancestors rebelled against in a fashion no less dramatic than the Boston Tea Party) was prohibited from being studied and extremely uncomfortable at the institution which was the only one specializing in that text.

My controversial opinion is that the Mishnah read on its own explicitly condones the consumption of “chicken parmesan”, and that the commentary on it is an intentional effort to contradict the meaning of the underlying text and revert to an earlier set of dietary laws. I had a friend from the synagogue I grew up at who kept very strict kosher regarding pork shellfish and cheeseburgers and freely consumed Chicken Tikka Masala. I believe that the “trafe banquet” was imprecise in its execution but that the underlying truth which enabled its religious legitimacy was the continuing practice among some Reform Jews to consume chicken parmesan whilst otherwise keeping the same dietary laws as Orthodox Jews in alignment with dietary practices attributed in the Talmud to “Galileans” (which I read as code for Christians).

What is Next

The next step being taken in many contexts including some which call themselves Orthodox is to reject this fundamental division of specialization in educational terms between men and women. The “Partnership” movement and the “Traditional Egalitarian” movement represent splinter factions in the direction of one another from the Modern Orthodox and Conservative movements respectively. What they share in common is an extension of the study of Talmud to women, meaning that the world they are creating is one in which the conditions which were so intolerable to my person as to cause me to spontaneously leave my place of employment and never return are now being extended to cover women in addition to men.

The next step which I am taking is to more deeply commit myself to continuing to represent authentically those behaviors which I believe to be best, incorporating both what I was raised with and what I found joy performing in the “no Talmud” Orthodox context which I was able to acclimate to into the most cohesive and actualized person that I can be.

My controversial view on feminism is that the end of the demand for the sort of labor which requires human beings to be turned into replaceable parts in an industrial machine will come one day and that women decided to throw themselves into the machine to rescue the men from that drudgery by helping to finish its objectives faster.

My controversial view on the hypothetical fusion point I perceive between Partnership and Traditional Egalitarian is that the reason why women were prohibited from studying the Talmud is that they would have realized the fact that it was bullshit and that these people are going to wind up reaching the exact same conclusion which Reform Judaism did through an extremely different pathway.

I have realized that I absolutely cannot be on “team Talmud” at this point and I am eagerly awaiting the day when the process of unravelling its many lies and manipulations and connecting to the valuable historical document which was preserved within it is begun in earnest by whoever else besides me realizes this fact about it. I did one page which was most relevant to me but that was as far as I got.

Thank you JTS

My favorite anecdote about this which I will now share concerns the English translations of these documents by the famous (or perhaps infamous depending on whom you ask) Jacob Neusner. He was brutally lambasted by his mentor for “misunderstanding the Hebrew/Aramaic”, and to this day people will respond to bold claims made about what the Mishnah or the Talmud says with “what language are you reading it in?” To provide one example, the Mishnah read on its own states plainly that the Jewish scriptures may be written “in Hebrew or in Greek”, and this section of the Talmud goes to great lengths to discredit the quality of that translation which was the basis of early Christianity and remains in use in the Greek Orthodox Church to this very day. Which is to say that arguing over translation is a debate as old as the schism between Judaism and Christianity.

The outcome of growing my knowledge of the Hebrew language has been that I have myself begun uncovering what I view as ideologically-motivated “mistranslations” within the officially-recognized Jewish canon.

I had the privilege of studying Talmud with the esteemed Rabbi Gordon Tucker at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and I found myself landing in an interesting disagreement as to whether or not certain passages of the Mishnah might have been authored prior to the invention of writing.

The religious perspective which I will now share with you the somehow-still-interested reader is that I believe the word “Torah” which is best translated in my opinion as “teaching” contrasts the word “Mishnah” which means “repetition” as describing two different means of conveying information. The Mishnah contains logical statements to be memorized and transmitted exactly as they are from generation to generation, and the Torah contains mythological stories to be retold in a fashion which preserves their essential emotional weight including when doing so requires an adjustment of the details.

The decision to commit the Torah to the page represented in my estimation the decision to canonize the current version of the telling of those ancestral stories as officially the final never-to-be-changed-again way of telling that story. The decision to claim that precisely this version of the story had always existed came alongside the decision to adopt a chronology which coincidentally or intentionally places Creation around the same time in which archeological evidence dates the invention of writing.

I was told once that the Mishnah was previously prohibited from being written down, before finally being preserved for fear it might go extinct if not written. I at the time scoffed at this idea, but I have become increasingly convinced that the Mishnah was indeed prohibited from being written down. I view it as a “separation of powers”.

I view it this way because another feature which I believe was introduced around the time of the commitment of the Pentateuch to the page was the widespread usage of other objects containing written passages from those books as in my opinion a job-security measure. The idea being that the people having committed to using writing for this holy text wanted to be assured that writing wouldn’t cease being popular. It seems crazy to imagine that writing would have been a passing fad from a world in which I am using it to communicate it with you right now, but in its earliest days it faced fierce opposition from many who believed its continuing existence posed an inherent threat to stable society including famously Socrates.

Tefillin and Mezuzahs ensure that the precise specifications of Torah scrolls always have skilled hands to execute on them which have practiced on texts which are always intentionally hidden from view. And to ensure that writing does not gain an undue amount of influence over the people, the Mishnah which represented the precisely-memorized lines of legal rulings dating back who knows how long would continue to exist independently of writing.

Of course the logical outcome which I am pointing towards here is that the decision to write the Mishnah down represented a decision to surrender to writing, whatever that means.

The Alphabet versus the Goddess

In Julian Jaynes’ The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, he postulates that language itself is a vehicle which enables consciousness. And I think that he has a point there.

Whereas other species may communicate using sounds, and even learn words in human languages, the nature of human language is vastly different in terms of its level of complexity when compared with other animal equivalents. I think that the duality present in us humans which is absent in other animals is between whatever Jaynes’ describes as consciousness and those qualia which we share with dogs and bats. And the view that this presents on writing is that in writing one may express that human-specific aspect without necessarily expressing any of the common-animal aspect.

This reminds me of a conversation I had with a man I met who introduced himself as Leo and whose Chinese name I never learned.

He was explaining to me how the hardest part of learning English was learning how to come across as “expressive” in this context. In Chinese tones convey semantic meaning, whereas in English variations in tone generally convey subtext. He found that if he simply spoke English as a plain translation of Chinese that he came across as “robotic”, and that learning to speak natural English required a greater degree of injection of emotion to fill the tonal space which in this language rarely conveys semantic meaning.

I believe that what the Talmud conveys most effectively in representing the decision to surrender to writing and be its bitch is the ability to produce statements which are logically coherent if at-times nonsensical, which it regularly does.

If you have read this far, and are the comment-leaving type, I hope that you will tell me whether what I have written here conveys something which feels true to your animal side as well as your higher language-mediated consciousness.

And I realize now that I was following the opposite Baal Teshuva journey to hers.

The famed concept is that people of Jewish ancestry who have lost touch with its practices find themselves spontaneously drawn to return to some form of Jewish practice.

The story I’m familiar with is that Judaism is heavily about honoring one’s ancestors, making it broadly similar to many traditional Chinese religious practices. An early controversy in the Catholic Church surrounded how to respond to Confucian veneration, and while the Pope at that time declared it incompatible with a Christian view, in later years the perspective of the Jesuit missionaries became the norm.

The way that I came to view the Jewish Sabbath was that the “second soul” which joined participants only on that day was the experience of intense intergenerational connectedness that manifested when performing a set of very ancient and unchanging rituals. Ultimately I believe that any sufficiently-old set of traditional practices becomes a vehicle for connecting with one’s priors who upheld those same traditions and that being connected with one’s priors provides an obvious advantage.

The Traditions of Reform Judaism

The nature of existing within a religion called “Reform Judaism” is that it represents only the merit of kindness and peacefulness and of following your own inner intuition when seeking ancestral practices to connect with. My experiences following that Shavuot led me ultimately to become disillusioned with the direction my inner intuition had previously been pointing in a very specific way: I ceased feeling a desire to connect with that specific set of ancestral practices but became even more convinced of the merits of the concept of connecting with ancestral practices.

When I imagine my ancestors as participating in my life’s journey alongside me, the story of my initial phase of seeking out greater religious observance was pleasing to those of my Jewish ancestors who lived prior to the 19th century and puzzling to those of my Jewish ancestors who lived during the 20th century. Yet my bacon-loving mother was ceaselessly supportive despite her own obvious lack of desire to return to the separation of meat and milk, and I imagined her Reform ancestors representing a similar Reform attitude of “to each his own” and being supportive if unconvinced.

One of the most significant traditions of Reform Judaism which was frequently repeated to me during my upbringing was the idea that we should be really excited about the “Messianic Age”, a time in which Isaiah’s prophecy of an end to armed conflict will come true, but extremely skeptical of the concept of “the Messiah”. When I sought closer alignment with my Jewish ancestors prior to the Reformation, the conflict which arose with both my former self literally and my ancestors who practiced Reform Judaism metaphorically was over this foreign belief.

The strange theological position which I think this belief upheld by my Reform Jewish mother represented was, I would later conclude, the complement of a view represented by the famous Maimonides, or at least one attributed to him in a book I read which sought to contextualize the distinction between his theological framework and other beliefs which co-existed alongside it prior to the establishment of his reputation. The belief attributed to him was that the only thing which could be said with certainty about the Messiah was that he would be a partilineal descendant of King David via King Solomon, and that everything else could not be determined conclusively. And I view this belief very specifically as representing the simplest possible rejection of Christianity and Islam, as a rejection of Jesus’ unknown paternity representing a conclusive disqualifying factor in terms of representing the position which Christians and Muslims both attribute to him. I think that he living in al-Andalus was articulating a Judaism which is about rebelling against Muslim authority.

The Muslim view is as I understand it is that Jesus did not die but rather rose to the heavens body-and-all like Elijah purportedly did, and the commonality I perceive between the two is that, whereas the most obvious argument against Jesus being the person responsible for fulfilling Isaiah’s prophecy that they would “beat their swords into ploughshares and not make war any more” was that he was dead and swords were still heavily being used, and the fact of Paul’s I-believe-genuine experience of a vision of Jesus at perhaps the same moment he died having created a counter-argument to this in “no he did not die he still lives”, the need to sidestep the possibility of this clearly-still-posthumously-influential figure-representing-a-desire-for-world-peace being the messiah was the motivating factor behind both negating his eligibility for Messiah-ness on the basis of his paternity and relegating him to an Elijah-figure who will bring the real Messiah who unlike him won’t die without producing a royal lineage, the latter of which was a possibility entertained by Christians as well.

Towards that end, I believe that it was James, his half-brother, who did represent the most legitimate concept of treating Jesus as Messiah because them having been raised by the same parents produced in both of them a similar sense of whatever Joseph and Miriam of Nazareth’s values and beliefs were and their primary defining difference was indeed their paternity. The Catholic framing of James as Jesus’ cousin serves first to de-legitimize any claim he and his progeny might have of a continuing royal lineage associated with Jesus, and the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary serves to further establish that this royal lineage centers on the boy whose biological father was not Joseph and not on the lineage of a Jewish biological male. I believe that this makes the belief system intrinsically more appealing to any male whose biological father is not Jewish.

Whereas the Maimonidean counterpoint to the overlap between “view Jesus as Eliyahu and allow for a second person as Messiah” and “celebrate the memory of Jesus and make no attempt to continue his lineage through others” is to place an emphasis on a strong desire at the top of one’s “wishlist” for an ideal messianic candidate being “from the same male lineage that oneself is also from”, the response communicated to Mohammad is to imagine Jesus as Elijah dying as a part of his Second Coming with authority being handed to a worthy Muslim leader, which aligns perhaps-uncannily closely with the solution presented in the Babylonian Talmud which is to create the existence of a second messiah who is the “son of Joseph” and for him to die and hand authority to an eligible partilineal descendant of King Solomon. This being consistent with the observation of overlap between the writings of the Midrash and the Quran, to the point of provoking accusations of plagiarism.

The perspective landed on based upon this person’s application of a Reform Jewish statement of “would you shut up already about the messiah and focus on our common ground regarding the other part of Isaiah’s prophecy which was about peace and brotherhood” was that Reform Judaism is technically compatible with both Zoroastrianism and Daoism, which both differ from it in precisely the same way - that being the belief in the existence of a specific messianic person who receives credit for bringing about the messianic age and is required to be a member of the same male lineage as that which produced the religion’s most famous poet and also coincidentally-or-not most of its modern practitioners.

The Reform-Oriented Baal Teshuva Impulse

The establishment of the Rabbinic holiday called “Hanukkah” and the de-canonization of the books of Maccabees in both the Jewish and Protestant traditions serve to present a specific perspective on the Hasmonean royal lineage and its legitimacy when compared with a hypothetical future Davidic lineage. The notion that Jesus believed his own succession would be based upon his intentional appointment rather than his biological reproduction is established within a widely-accepted passage assigning the name to “Peter” to someone as symbolizing his position as a cornerstone in whatever Jesus viewed his church to be. The historicity of this statement is beyond my ability to assess, and yet I think the notion that he himself wanted to begin a society in which the qualification for leadership was not about lineage but rather exclusively about individual merit is a notion very consistent with the direction in which Pauline Christianity took even after segments of it ceased being in alignment with the continuation of the legacy of the authority vested in the Seat of St. Peter.

Hence what we see within the Abrahamic realizations of the concept of Saoshiyant/Li Hong/Messiah are a version which specifically views this lineage requirement as producing a person who would so exemplify the ideals of the ancient hero being referenced as to make those ideals generalizable to people of all lineages, a version which specifically views these lineage requirements as producing a person who will so exemplify the ideals of the ancient hero being referenced as to produce an unending lineage capable of representing those values forever without producing another person like King Solomon, and a version which views these lineage requirements as producing a person who will not produce a lineage and who will instead guide a member of a closely-related lineage to be capable of defining enduring peace.

The Reform perspective which I am defining as strictly non-overlapping with the Orthodox perspective is that a day will come when the ideal representation of the values of King David which inspired the messages heard by Isaiah and others are obvious and known to all the peoples of the Earth, and that on that day the idea of honoring and valuing your ancestors the way Reform Judaism does will be widely recognized for its obvious benefit, that every existing religion will continue in a fashion similar to its fashion of continuation wherein the descendants of its present adherents will endeavor to uphold the most resonant aspects of those traditions in a way which authentically satisfies their own inner “Baal Teshuva” impulses. Which is simply the impulse of a later iteration on something to connect with and understand its former iterations as a means of understanding itself.

The Non-Jewish Baal Teshuva Impulse

I learned recently from my Aunt about my own family’s history. My grandfather was in possession of a book describing the lineage of his wife’s family spanning back nearly ten generations, to a time when a well-regarded Bishop moved his family to the Colony of Pennsylvania. The story I know from my father is that this same grandfather was kicked out of church for questioning the existence of God, and it would seem that the story told by his decision to write in the names of his children to this book of his wife’s genealogy was that Sid found in Marion a connection to the good aspects of Christianity which he had become disconnected from when he broke away from the denomination he did not fit in whose identity remains unknown to me.

When I decided to ask myself what it would look like to connect to my father’s religious values the same way an Orthodox Jew would connect to his own father’s religious values, I wound up on a fascinating journey through some dangerous and scary places as well as some surprisingly-pleasant ones. And the place it took me was towards a deep integration of those values which my father and his father had retained from Christianity even shedding the underlying religious framework. My honest opinion is that my father, who is a self-declared atheist, is the most Christ-like person I have ever met. I believe actually that many people in our world today who would themselves state a strong opposition to Christianity are behaving in accordance with many values which they do not share with their pre-Christian ancestors.

The key question which I believe that my existence seeks to answer is that of how one reconciles within one’s person the combination of a deep distillation of those good things which Jesus (and specifically Peter and Paul) represented in the absence of any specific religious claims made by them (or him) with the concept of rejecting the concept of attributing tremendous importance to a specific religious figure while otherwise honoring the legacy of the religious traditions which Jesus Peter and Paul all themselves upheld. When I find myself desiring to speak that answer, it is a desire to exist in a world in which my parents’ ancestors have no reason to be in conflict with one another either literally or symbolically. And when I find myself picturing such a world, a world in which my maternal and paternal Baal Teshuva impulses both point in the same direction, it is a world in which the necessity of a person holding as much power as Jesus or Yehuda Ha’Nasi or the Baal Shem Tov or Mohammad has been obviated, because those things which might be called “common sense” are universally-understood by all humans and the tools to live a life in which conflicts always become opportunities for growth are accessible to all human beings.

The challenge of imagining the existence of this world is that no set of human ancestors is free from the perpetration of the types of behaviors which would be incompatible with a world in which everyone universally agreed on reaching mutually-beneficial solutions to conflicts every time.

The gratitude that fills my person is that my father is an exemplar of good behaviors and the opportunities he presented me for improvement are highly understandable to me. I am grateful to have been born to a woman whom I view in a similar fashion.

My Controversial Belief

My controversial belief is that the concept of a “blood feud” remains as innate to humans as it was in our tribal days. I think that the simplest cause of the perpetuation of a blood feud is that one or often both parties refuse to recognize their own opportunities for improvement and choose to instead project that blame onto the other party. At the very root of my opinion on religious matters concerning the faiths of my ancestors is that Judaism has existed for a very long time built atop a blood feud with Amalek, and that the other party having been driven extinct has created a situation in which the opportunities for improvement which existed within Judah and which still exist to this very day can be perpetually ignored by continuing to beat a dead horse. I have come to view the conflict between Judah-ism and Samaritanism, which is practiced in the lands to the north of the bordering Mount Ephraim, as a continuation of the conflict described in Isaiah 11 between Judah and Ephraim. A conflict dating back as far as the authorship of the line in the Judahite scriptures which blames the conquest of the Kingdom of Israel on insufficient devotion to the God of Israel.

The rooting of my Baal Teshuva impulse is the belief that a line of the most ancient Israelite hymn to the God of Israel we have refers to a point in history in which Amalek and Ephraim did not have cause to hate one another, and that no blood feud is too deep-seated to be reconciled. I dream of a world in which the other blood feuds manifesting around us are also resolved with both parties identifying and acting on their opportunities for improvement, to the mutual satisfaction of any ancestors real or imagined and their current living progeny alike.

Thanks for reading.

Miriam died, and after she died, a bloody conflict between Moses and Aaron left only one brother surviving.

I believe that this ancestral memory was kept alive in the surviving descendants of such an intense and exciting experience.

If Moses were alive today, he would be diagnosed with schizophrenia. He heard a voice and issued commands from it to govern the people.

Julian Jaynes believed that this state of being was the normal mode of being for “bicameral minds” which all humans possessed prior to the Iron Age.

What’s fascinating about the story of the society governed based upon the imaginary voice Moses heard is that in that society other people were able to replicate his same schizophrenia. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and others all experienced the same symptom experienced by Moses and attributed to their schizophrenic delusions the same name.

Which is to say that the very original concept of the service being done by the priests who were members of Moses’ nephew’s lineage was to keep alive not Moses himself but the disembodied voice which spoke through him in such a successful fashion as to cause people who were more distantly related to sometimes spontaneously experience his same mental illness.

The difference between a religion and the cult of a madman comes entirely down to the quality of the guidance being offered by the not-real voice which exists only in the head of a crazy person.

The guidance offered by the voice heard by this I-believe-real ancient human seems to be pretty good to me. And it feels as though legitimately a conflict exists at the root of most of the planet which is between a group of people who says that Mohammad the Ishmaelite has the best interpretation, a group of people who says that Ezra the Scribe has the best interpretation, and a group of people who says that Saul of Tarsus has the best interpretation.

The key cornerstone of the policies of King Saul as I view him is the objective of spreading this mental illness to even more distantly related humans than the Prophets based on the idea that this particular fantasy world is his personal favorite.

Whereas in my view the objective pursued by Ezra the Scribe is to propagate the belief that this ailment has been permanently cured in everyone and that going forward the words of human close-relatives of Moses will serve the same purpose as the abstract voice which has been permanently silenced.

I believe that the story of Hercules represents symbolically the pathway by which an exceptional human might become mythologized in a fashion similar to the fashion in which Moses and his siblings were mythologized. That he is human and his exceptional-ness is divine represents to me an intentional effort to keep things separate as a flouting of the common trend of elevating ancient heroes into divine status. Saul submits to this trend in the figure of Joshua of Nazareth, who appears within his mind in a similar fashion to the manner in which the God of Israel appeared in Moses’ mind. Ezra applies this trend to the collective of Judah, and those who came after him continue to treat the words of humans of Jewish descent as precisely equivalent to the disembodied voice heard by certain specific people of Israel in the ancient past.

The story of Mohammad is that his schizophrenia referred to itself using a different name.

A spirit of truth spoke via Zarathustra and via Lao Tzu. And this message was received in a fashion “tainted” or more charitably “colored” by its medium.

Both Saoshiyant and Li Hong represent this coloration.

To one who views these as approximate truths, filtered through the hand of the humans delivering them, this issue poses no problem at all.

(The pun three paragraphs ago was not intended by the human delivering this message.)

The truth-seeking machine’s fatal flaw is however also the existence of this coloration. A lie which satisfies this part of oneself will appear more truthy than a truth which does not.

As Phoebe Buffay once said, “People will believe anything you tell them if it’s a compliment.”

The drive which may become horny for truth or a bigger number or a bigger pair of breasts finds its satisfaction in the belief that it has done its job well. And its sensitivity is not only inconsistent between individuals but may be trained differently and in some cases intentionally modulated, by one who has learned how to do so.

One cannot live and die by their critics.

That being said the single most effective tactic to hold on to a non-truth
is to develop a thick skin which sheds from itself all criticisms
which might lead one towards the truth.

A lie which enhances reproductive satisfaction is precisely the sort of lie which may be kept alive as truth using the same tools which all humans necessarily must use to instantiate a persistent self constituting more than simply the sum of all perspectives spoken by other selves.

A truth which is overly naked in its articulation might fail to be received by a “cogito ego sum” which is horny for something other than what the speakers is.

Such a truth may only be suggested.

When this day comes, the job of being someone who discovers new technologies will cease to exist entirely.

So what then? Personally I think that the inevitability of this outcome means it ought to be embraced rather than feared. I look forward to the day when there will never be another Albert Einstein, because that will be the day when we have access to the full palette of possibilities to paint our stories across the world.

Not only this, but whenever this world comes about, our priorities will dramatically shift.

I remember visiting the State Capital in Austin Texas recently. I looked up at the portraits of all of the governors and was informed that enough space yet remained in the rotunda for dozens more.

But it occurred to me to wonder what would happen after that?

Unless one plans on bringing about human extinction on a relatively short timeframe, conservative estimates place the lifetime of our planet at around 3 billion years. I don’t want to imagine how large a rotunda would be needed to display portraits corresponding to three billion years’ worth of governors.

The same concern arises when considering burial plots. While I have enjoyed firsthand the benefits of creating a peaceful location to connect with one’s dearly departed, I suspect that three billion years’ worth of permanent individual burial plots might wind up covering all landmasses with cemetaries. And this would not leave any room for the people still living.

Whenever the day comes that we have finished filling out the tech-tree of inventions that can exist both in the real world and in the imagination, I believe that we will cease thinking about honoring the importance of people responsible for uncovering each node and racing to be among those people, and instead focus on making the best possible use of all of those things we have Edison and Newton and Darwin to thank for.

It will be a horrifying nightmare for all of the world’s narcissists - and I can’t wait to live in it.

This past conference was fascinating, and one interesting detail which I believe the hypothetical NDA I signed would allow me to share is that many attendees had become motivated to come specifically to meet with a presenter who was “cancelled” shortly before the conference began.

Although I initially was skeptical of the decisions made by the group’s leaders, I appreciated their merit once I witnessed their outcome. And I feel that I learned a lot from witnessing the dynamics of responding to a “cancellation” from within the context of what I would boldly describe as a “well-functioning” community.

I also believe that it has allowed me to discern a meaningful conclusion, which I will now share.

The Moral of the Story

The Conference was described as “Confronting the Cannibal Self”, and this theme was repeated in its story, whose recording will surely be published shortly on YouTube. One of the best features of its telling, which might not make the cut, was the fact that each of three storytelling sessions began with a recounting of the prior night’s tale in an interactive fashion. I arrived on my first night carrying the weight of 1300 miles of travel, and the combination of the half-heard story on that first night and its summary on the second allowed me to get caught up and to enjoy the rest of the experience without feeling like I’d missed anything because of my initial weariness.

I don’t want to spoil the story here but I want to explain why I think that its moral revealed a mistake currently made by many.

I will share because my privacy is mine to invade the way that I responded to this story, and the way in which it allowed me to perceive a mistake I was making.

My Interpretation of the Moral of the Story

The protagonist encounters a similar situation repeatedly; he is confronted with a woman with an evil sister, whom he defats, after which they enjoy brief marital bliss but no children before he hears the call to adventure and leaves to be connected with another woman. I described this as a manifestation of the man’s worshipful view on woman. The irreconcilable difference between the sexes is that whereas females eventually gain access to the ability to themselves participate in the process which led to their own existence, males eventually gain access to the ability to contribute the starting materials to a process which they will only ever be able to understand via observation and empathy. Or perhaps memory, if one believes in the notion of pre-natal memory.

The protagonist responds to his lack of observation/empathy/prenatal memory by engaging in “splitting”, creating both a female whom he worships and a female whom he hates and fears. The action he takes, killing the “shadow” and marrying her complement, creates temporary bliss, but it does not satisfy his adventurer’s spirit.

The turning point in his journey is when he uses the gift of life himself, restoring to life the victims of another’s violence, and in so doing disproving his perceived inferiority. He then first confronts an echo of the shadow of the woman who brought him closest to his moment of connection with his own life-giving energies, and the end of his feelings of inadequacy which prevent him from developing a cohesive vision of the females in his life. And whereas in their previous encounter he had himself split into a human self and an animal self in the form of a woodpecker in order to win a victory, this time around he demonstrates his own sense of inner cohesion by transforming into a similar animal temporarily in order to outwit his opponent before then transforming back into himself.

His reward for this is that he then finally meets the woman with whom he has children, and his story ends in a peaceful manner, if one whose loose ends allow for a sequel starring his children. Which is in my view the ideal endpoint for the story of a life. A peaceful ending for you, and something for others to build on after you are gone.

In his final confrontation after gaining his power, he does not apologize for what he is doing. In this case he is killing a cannibal woman who is harming other people in order to feed her children, due to her own lack of or unwillingness to nourish them using her own gift of life. This contrasts with the protagonist, whose children are nourished by his animal self even posthumously. The moral of his story was that obtaining that gift and using it for its intended purpose is the pathway towards being rewarded with an end to one’s inner “call to adventure” which often manifests in an inner restlessness, and that although the gift of life which women possess may be more obvious in the value it provides, a good man will be more nourishing than a wicked woman - even an imagined one.

The existence of this break made it possible to endure the insane working conditions endured by teachers - until at a certain point it no longer did.

I think that social media is being treated much the same way teachers are sometimes treated. The person or thing trying to solve the problem is being blamed for the problem.

People go to social media to do the type of socializing they can’t do in the real world.

The real question is why aren’t we socializing in the real world?

I have come upon my own answer to this question, but I know better than to post it on social media. But I am among those who are hopeful that at some point the underlying issue whose symptoms are being made broadly visible on social media platforms will at a certain point provoke a more sensible solution.

I decided recently to read the original Studies in Hysteria, which introduced the concept of “the talking cure” as a means of treating the titular ailment. I believe that whereas in Freud’s time one might understand that psychosis’ female-dominance as an outcome of the male-dominated nature of his society, one might look to a society such as ours as precisely the place in which the universality of the human psyche would be made manifest in the form of the male equivalent.

I don’t believe it is precisely the same, but I am going to propose the idea in this post that the antisocial behavior which is in some circles an epidemic among young men might be thought of as resulting from interplay between the same fundamental principles which underly “hysteria”.

On a basic level, an individual is either stably adjusted to their social setting, or they are in some way maladjusted. Dabrowski viewed these maladjustments as a sign of potential, and I agree. I think that we humans possess the ability to uncover new ideas which our societies were previously unaware-of, and that one mechanism for doing this is to partially or entirely disconnect from one’s society, “retrieve the truth from the fabric of the unknown”, and then bring it back to society to share with others. Moreover I do believe that the glue which holds a society together is some form of empathy network, and to my “Freudian” identification that there is a connection between biological and emotional intimacy.

I mention this because I believe that this explains the etiology of hysteria. I think that in the time in which Breuer and Freud started their work it was not uncommon for women to respond to treatment which they would not be subjected to in their ideal society by fleeing from society led by their wombs, as if fleeing an abusive relationship for the benefit of a mistreated child. I think that what they succeeded in achieving was to create a society in which these behaviors were reduced to the point that “hysteria” is far less widespread than it was among women when they first started.

I don’t think that the penis and the womb are strictly interchangeable, but I imagine that a similar instinct to escape from a bad situation in an eccentric way might also be thought of as led by a male’s reproductive machinery. If one imagines the experience of being a non-mating male in a polygynous society, an extremely common experience among non-human primates, the instinct to leave this situation in favor of one in which reproduction were possible might have driven males that had the potential to start their own societies to do just that.

I view hysteria as the female equivalent of wanting to run off and start a new society. The feedback loop which makes the solution pioneered by Breuer and Freud work is not only that someone’s faith in society is restored to the point that they no longer find themselves uncontrollably fleeing from it as an outcome of a pleasant conversation, but also that their underlying complaints are understood and acted upon by those listening to them.

The complexity of what I’m calling “male hysteria” is that strictly speaking you might imagine that an early polygynous human society would have developed a mechanism for ensuring the cooperation of males whose reproductive drives were not being satisfied at all. Which is to say that the system of control which I am suggesting to be falling apart is quite a bit older than the concept of monogamy.